Snow White
by Clar the Pirate
Summary: What colour were her eyes? A not-quite-a-retelling of modern, fast, and loose proportions. Your warning: set in med school and, shall we say, poetically graphic.


**Snow White**

_Once upon a time_ will give you false expectations so it's safer just to say his name is Edward and he's doing med at Otago, which is, let's face it, the best university in the country. He has a big head – an objective fact not a turn of phrase, about midway between a volleyball and a basketball – and thick black hair that curls in large lazy loops. He's clean-shaven, technically, since he always misses a couple of spots along the underside of his jaw. His face is mobile; can shape itself into a myriad of expressions, most of which are tinged with self-deprecation. He holds himself lightly.

You can see it all in a glance at his reflection in the window of the door he's about to enter. The glass is wavery with age but that's only to be expected in the Lindo Ferguson. It is four stories of rotund cream pillars and red brick. A self-satisfied building content to sit behind green-leafed trees, designed by Edmund Anscombe as a fitting monument to the life-saving knowledge imparted within. Life-saving but squishy, which is why Edward is stalling, one hand on the doorknob, shifting his head about on his neck trying to get it comfortable. Today is Edward's first try at human dissection.

He had a choice. Most people forget this, but Edward's intelligent; he is. He would have done equally well pursuing a career in law, pharmacy, geology, history – he doesn't have the gravitas and ego to make a politician but if he'd wanted to he could have held a classroom of indifferent teenagers spell-bound. He could have, but he chose medicine because his grandfather (his father's father) died of a brain tumour before he was born. He didn't decide to cure cancer or even help treat people with it, no, his reason for wanting to be a doctor is more trivial, more personal.

When he was seventeen, Edward found himself in the upstairs study (a misnomer learnt from his sister, there wasn't actually a study downstairs from which to differentiate). He started pulling books off the shelf; the old ones on the top shelf with leather covers, gold etched titles, and slowly disintegrating binding. The _Beauties of Shakespeare, Short History of the English People, _and_ Enchanter's Nightshade_ held only passing interest. _Notes on Anatomy_ (Vol. I: Head and Neck) by W. P. Gowland M.D., F.R.C.S, and John Cairney, Edward paused over.

Inside the front cover was inscribed _G.M. Taylor 1938_, and a dated list of dissections with page references to the relevant material. One of Edward's grandfather's books from when he had been studying medicine. Edward flicked through the pages. Each one was marked in some way – a sentence underlined, a diagram pencilled in the space at the top, scribbles in every margin and between paragraphs. On page 210 he read:

THE FRONTAL BONE. Usually said to consist of: (_a_) a vertical or frontal portion, above, and (_b_) a horizontal portion below, consisting of two _orbital plates_, separated by a notch, the _ethmoidal notch_. The whole bone may be described as presenting two surfaces: (1) extracranial, and (2) intracranial. * _ N.B – which sfot is almost Ltly below infra-orb? fm – i.e. dirn in "down & out" (a 'good disn for txais!)_

Alright, so he couldn't really read the spidery script of G.M. Taylor's supplementary notes, but nevertheless he had a moment of fragile golden revelation. This man who had died before Edward was born had lived. Lived, as simple, trivial, personal as that. Edward cried for the first time for the grandfather he had never met, and decided he would be a doctor.

But seriously, enough stalling. A rush of impatient classmates gets him through the front door and carries him all the way into the classroom. Body bags are laid out in neat rows on the workbenches; they're black plastic, just like in the movies. The room smells funny, not bad yet, just not right. Edward goes to a table, picks one at random because the black bags prevent discrimination. He's joined by five others. They stand two either side of the head, two in the middle, and two at the feet but no one makes the connection with pall bearers.

Dr Marilyn Duxson enters, takes her place behind the desk at the front of the room, taps the whiteboard behind her and gives a brief outline of what we're hoping to achieve here today – because this isn't the kind of thing you send people into unprepared. The introduction is over too quickly and everyone at every bench in the room is caught out, hesitates. Edward is by the head of the bag and he glances at the girl opposite him politely. Lydia twists her lips and scrunches her nose, hoping to indicate that this also isn't the kind of thing where 'ladies first' applies. Edward nods, reaches out to grasp the zip, and pulls it down.

No one warned him about the eyes.

He doesn't notice the black hair, the red lips, the waxy pale skin that's white as snow, because the girlcorpse doesn't have eyes.

The eyeballs shrivelled during the processing of the body, readying it for dissection. The eyelids hang slack, fleshy concaves over empty space. They don't meet perfectly without coagulate support; between misaligned eyelashes peers nothing.

The bodies come from the Dunedin Public Hospital morgue. No one doing a dissection really enquires further as to the origins of a cadaver but in the case of this girl there's no point. She was dumped at the hospital; no name, no id, end of story. Somewhere in North-East Valley there might have been seven guys, scared shitless and panicking because there was a girl who had just dropped dead in their flat. She'd only been living with them for a while, wasn't related to any of them, didn't really know any of them before she turned up on their doorstep – could you get any more dodgy? And maybe a couple of months later, one of the guys might have found a mouldy, half-eaten apple under the couch and wondered at it a moment before chucking it out. But there's no way of knowing. The only certain thing is that once upon a time there was a girl who lived, and then she died. As simple, trivial, personal as that.

Edward gets over the shock, picks up his scalpel. And before you ask, not a thought crosses his mind about kissing her.

* * *

* _Gowland, W.P. (M.D., F.R.C.S.), et al. _Notes on Anatomy: Vol I. Head and Neck. _Wilson & Ratcliff. Dunedin, New Zealand: 1938. Pp. 210._


End file.
